Nature Notes

LARRY PENNY

From the way things are progressing, it looks as if All Saints' Day will be coincident with the peak in fall colors. Shortly after, the leaves will turn drab and begin to fall en masse. After an extremely atypical spring, fall is not at all unfamiliar.

While a few birds are still passing through, most of the ones arriving these days will probably be around for the winter. It's time to put the feeders out and start keeping track of the birds visiting them.

Joe and Joan Vagan have a feeder in the Clearwater community of Springs. They've had some nice birds around already, including several goldfinches and a brown creeper.

Earmarks On The Head

On Monday morning, they were visited by a woodpecker that just didn't seem to fit the description for a red-belly or a hairy.

When Joe looked at it closely through the binoculars, he could see two white stripes on the head - one over and behind the eye, one under the eye - plus a little red on the face and a wash of yellow on the chest, all earmarks of the yellow-bellied sapsucker, a juvenile.

This bird could stay on, but odds are that it will get up and go farther south before long.

John Van Sickle was busy putting his garden to sleep over the weekend. While he was working, he was visited by both species of kinglets, rubycrowns and goldencrowns, as well as a phoebe, a young solitary vireo, and two thrushes.

The thrushes were of most interest, as they were not brown in coloration, but olivaceous. Each had an obvious buffy ring around each eye, the speculum.

They turned out to be Swainson's thrushes, birds that are very hard to find here in eastern Long Island. John came up with two.

Common Thrushes

Other, more common thrushes were seen this weekend. Paul and Lisa D'Andrea saw two hermit thrushes at the Grace Estate in Northwest. Hermits are the thrushes most likely to be seen in the winter. They have rufous tails, which they are always jerking up and down.

Eastern bluebirds are thrushes as well. Paul and Lisa saw four of them along Mile Hill Road; these are also liable to stay around for the winter.

Kinglets were all over during the weekend. The writer had several flycatching around his house Sunday afternoon. Paul and Lisa saw several at different Northwest spots, and Eric Salzman encountered several in the Quogue area.

The stalwarts of the winter finch feeder population at this latitude are juncos and white-throated sparrows. Thus far, it looks like a good year for both species. Already there are lots of white-throats around.

A good many of them are immatures, which lack the white stripes (they are buff) on the head and the white on the throat.

Eric Salzman was taking the family dog for a walk in Prospect Park in Brooklyn last Thursday morning. Great flocks of small birds would stream in from the east, alight on branches for a few seconds, then take off in the direction of Manhattan.

About 90 percent of them were juncos.

Pokeberries

Cedar waxwings are also plentiful at this time. Eric Salzman was scanning several in his East Quogue yard, both adults and grayish young-of-the-year. They were feeding on pokeberries, an early fall favorite of many birds.

Barbara Dayton called Friday morning. She was watching a grayish bird with dipped-in-yellow-paint end of tail; it had just hit one of her windows and was sitting up, motionless, on the ground. It had passed some reddish stool.

The bird was a young cedar waxwing. It, too, had probably been feeding on pokeberries; perhaps on Russian olive fruit. (So late in the season, pokeberries are often overripe, and birds that feed on them can get dipsy and fly into things like windows.)

Barbara was advised to keep track of the bird and it would be picked up if it didn't recover. About a half-hour later she called again. The bird had flown up onto a limb, perched for a spell, then flown off.

Rare And Elusive

Eric was back in Quogue on Saturday, checking out the birds at a small preserve on the north side of the barrier beach, south of the barrier bay.

In a reedy area alongside a raised walkway, he came upon a very tiny brown bird with almost no tail.

It hit the ground, darted along, passed under the walkway, re-emerged. He got a second look at it and heard its chipping.

It had to be the rare and elusive sedge wren. He's only seen two, in a lifetime of birding.

Later in the day, a peregrine falcon flew over.

Flushed Out

On Friday, Fred Einsidler was at his Napeague residence when a northern harrier went by.

Jean Held was on a Long Pond Greenbelt walk Sunday morning; the walkers flushed out a gray owl which could have been a long-eared or barred owl.

It appeared to be a little too big for a screech, most of which, on Long Island, are red-brown, not gray.

Exquisite Sprig

It is the season of the waterfowl; they are returning. In the late afternoon of Oct. 13, nine snow geese went by, east to west, along the Montauk ocean beach, at eye level with Rav Freidel's living-room window.

On Friday, Marvin Kuhn and Gus Antell were able to get a fine look at a pair of pintails (sometimes called "sprig") at Pots and Kettles in Hook Pond, East Hampton.

Pintails are among the most exquisite of ducks, very fast fliers, and much more common along the Central (i.e., Mississippi) Flyway than along the Atlantic Flyway.

Answering The Honk

Eric Salzman reports that brant, by the hundreds, had arrived in the Shinnecock Bay system as of the weekend. He also saw several red-breasted mergansers (no greenhead males) and a few buffleheads, both species recent arrivals.

The writer was treated to a spectacular display of waterfowl on Wednesday and Thursday of last week. On the first day, he was stationed on Long Lane northwest of East Hampton High School, at about 4:40 p.m.

By that time, the recently harvested fields southwest of the road were already replete with a thousand or two Canada geese, and several snow geese.

Hundreds more were still arriving, honking as they approached, being answered from those on the field, setting their wings, and dropping out of the sky onto the ground.

Fall's First Assembly

They were streaming in from every direction; it was the first big assembly of the fall season.

The incoming groups were of all sizes - twos, threes, fours, fives, and larger, as large as 350.

There were three different groups of snow geese: more than 50, fewer than 75; in all, as many juveniles as adults. The snows kept to themselves.

Several Canada geese sported colored collars with black numbers. The Canadas mostly fed on corn leavings, frequently sparred with each other, and all the while honked.

Something Happened

The noise was deafening. Most probably, the new arrivals were drawn to this great, neverending cacophony.

There was still plenty of light. Geese were spread out over the entire field between Route 114 and Long Lane.

Then something happened. At 5:27, the geese began ascending in a great cloud.

A man was seen running down the length of the field, clapping.

By 5:29 they had all left, to somewhere to the southeast.

Hook Pond?

Mass Departure

The writer arrived at the same spot shortly after 6 p.m. last Thursday. The light was fading rapidly.

The field was just as full of geese as it had been the previous afternoon. There had to have been 2,500 of them, some with collars. At least 50 were snows.

No more were arriving, and no one had chased them away. There were two other groups of people observing them.

At 6:09, they began leaving - not all at once, mind you, but in vari-sized groups, some large, most small. They all took off in the same way, heading northwest, into the wind.

Once off the ground, they all climbed, turned, and headed off in the same way, toward the southeast, about 100 or 150 feet up. By 6:29, they'd all gone; the field was empty.

On this day, the geese left on their own accord. It was time for them to bed down for the night.

Ladybirds Pack It In

Geese were not the only creatures gathering in great bunches, so were ladybird beetles.

Ira Bard called on Saturday afternoon from Northwest; he was besieged with them - 200 of them. They had been landing on him as he worked in the yard, now they were gathering on the west side of his garage, flying around where they were gathering.

He looked at several close up. Some had zero black spots. Others had five and plus or minus that number. Still others had as many as 16. Some were red, some were yellowish.

It looked as if the cluster had more than one species.

They were getting ready to pack it in for the winter, and evidently had picked Ira's garage in which to hibernate.

Orange Magnet

Marvin and Virginia Kuhn were sitting in their backyard at the eastern edge of East Hampton Sunday afternoon when a swarm of 50 or so ladybugs buzzed in and buzzed out. It's almost a sure thing that they had their eye on one of the Kuhns' deserted outbuildings, the perfect place to enter into suspended animation until the spring.

Orange is a universal "warning" color because of its visibility from afar. In monarch butterflies, it "warns" potential predators. In ladybird beetles, it's not so much a warner as a species magnet. How many other orange beetles are there around? Very few.

Rusty Drumm was on a trail walk to Montauk Point on Sunday. The walkers came upon several puddles filled with frogs southeast of Oyster Pond. The larger ones had brown spots; the smaller ones were just brownish. They had pointed snouts.

They were southern leopard frogs, members of the only remaining population we know about on the South Fork, one of the few populations left in New York State.

We had thought this population might have perished, as we hadn't heard them in their breeding chorus this spring, a time when Oyster Pond was at a record high level and full of salt water from overwash, and not at all suitable for leopard-frog breeding.

They not only survived, they must have bred as well, and without our knowledge, which, if you're an endangered species, is the best way of all to breed.

A Sick Deer

On Monday morning Diane Heidke called. She had a sick deer, slobbering at the mouth, in her yard off Stony Hill Road, not far from the Bridgehampton racetrack.

It was difficult getting a wildlife rehabilitator to respond; they were all tied up with urgent business.

Adrienne Bourel got free. She went over, but the deer spooked and ran into the woods.

It came back later on, however, and lay down; its condition had worsened.

Rutting Season

By the time Kathryn Wilson, a deer expert, came by, the deer had died. It had a puncture wound in the chest.

She took the deer and examined it. The wall of one of the stomachs was ruptured; the contents had spilled out into the coelomic cavity. The deer must have been hit by a motor vehicle.

A deer roadkill was found Sunday by Jean Held on the Sag Harbor Turnpike south of Scuttlehole Road. The writer came upon a fresh one on Route 114 in North Haven south of Ferry Road on Monday evening.

In Deerville, it is the rutting season. There will be a lot of deer running out onto the highway during the next several weeks. Be on the alert!